2008.01.20

Firefox 3 beta 2

Last night I decided to finally try out the Firefox beta. I’ve been hearing some good stuff about it, and since my Internet link was a bit decent for a change I thought “Why not”? This is how I got it up and running on my Debian box.

Download and Install

Once downloaded, “installing” is actually just a matter of extracting the archive. My preferred location is /opt so I did (as root, of course):
# cd /opt
# tar jxf firefox-3.0b2.tar.bz2

But having to type /opt/firefox/firefox into fbrun each time you want to launch firefox is probably not much fun so:
# ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/local/bin

Now you can run firefox by just typing firefox, at least assuming that /usr/local/bin is in your path. If, for some strange reason, it is not, as your user:
% path=(/usr/local/bin $path)

..will do the trick. You will probably want to put that in your .zshenv as well, so that you don’t have to type it each time you log in.

If you still have firefox2/iceweasel installed on your system, then it will depend on the order of elements in $PATH, which firefox gets launched when you type ‘firefox’. There are several ways you can deal with this, depending on your own preferences.

You could aptitude remove iceweasel. That may be a little drastic. On, the other hand, I cannot stand the name iceweasel, so I was more than happy to get rid of it. If the Firefox 3 beta gives me any problems, I’m not too worried. I’ve got Opera.

If you aren’t ready to ditch Firefox 2, then you can either rename /usr/bin/firefox to something like /usr/bin/firefox2 or rename /usr/local/bin/firefox to /usr/local/bin/firefox3. It all depends on which browser you want to be launched when you type firefox.

Plug-ins

You probably already have some plug-ins running with your current Firefox, such as flash, mozilla-mplayer and the Java plug-in. To use them in Firefox 3, simply:
# cd /opt/firefox
# rm -rf plugins
# ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins /opt/firefox/plugins

And now you should have your plug-ins working in Firefox 3.

The verdict so far

I haven’t had a chance to discover all that much, but so far Firefox 3 hasn’t given me any worries. One of the biggest benefits of using Mozilla’s packages, from a Debian user’s point-of-view, is that you get rid of that brain-dead iceweasel name.

One thing I never liked about Firefox was bookmarks management. It has always felt very quirky to me. For instance, I always want to have my folders and bookmarks sorted alphabetically by name, automatically. Also, using folders to categorize bookmarks felt limiting. I’ve always liked the ideas behind Epiphany’s bookmarking system, even though it can get difficult to manage with a lot of bookmarks.

Firefox 3 now allows you to attach tags to bookmarks. You can still categorize them into folders as well. I haven’t had a chance to play around with this yet but I will be really happy if this helps me bring about some order among my bookmarks.

There is also a little icon in the address bar that you can click to bookmark a page. I don’t really know why they added that, since CTRL+D is far quicker. Also, they used a star icon. It got me confused at first. I’m having some difficulty associating the image of a star with the concept of a bookmark. Maybe I’m just awfully stupid and don’t get the obvious..

The address-bar has a new, more visual drop-down. It searches through not only your history but your bookmarks (and bookmark tags) as well. I haven’t used it long enough to say whether it is useful or annoying, but the default font size is *very* large..

Well, that’s about it for now. I will be using Firefox 3 as my browser for a while, to put it to the test. Then we’ll see whether I stay with it or crawl back to trusty old Opera. I’m sure I’ll keep you posted whatever I decide to do.